Comment by droserasprout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by droserasprout | Hacker News Reader

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I can confirm this holding OP6 (enchilada) in my hands — it's a flagship postmarketOS device. It also has other nerd options available — Sailfish and Windows (Renegade Project) — but obviously with poor hardware support.

I highly recommend keeping an eye on postmarketOS blog. [1] It's a fun reading, and development's been really rapid lately.

What stopped me from full migration to pmOS the last time I tried it about a year ago was poor support of Magisk and Xposed in Waydroid, two things I can't imagine using Android apps without.

But! With some tricks you can get pmOS dualboot on OP6. [2] Haven't tried it, but looks amazing.

I think with the current direction and velocity, pmOS is going to get really close to Android in usability on supported hardware in the next couple of years. Except for power saving parity that never gonna happen.

[1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/

[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchil...

True. I have installed PMOS on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and it is has great support for the hardware.

Amazed to see Linux booting natively on a palm sized device with full hardware support and computer capabilities was out of the world!

Given the fact that the device is more than a decade old, it still runs the mainline 6.x Linux kernel and the UI is good! (desktop manager which I've installed it is based on POSH Shell).

Looks cool and since calls, SMS, Wi-Fi and data works fine to a good extent, the only gripe was that camera is unusable in it's current form. Have not tried the android subsystem yet I don't think it'll work due to device limitations.

Have installed Tailscale and primarily using it for remote SSH administration of all my devices through Tailscale. The device build is still solid (which I don't see in the newer devices! due to planned obsolescence) and browser based netbanking access works fine.

Caveats of a small device, keyboard and user experience matters though I'm not complaining because I can pretty much see what happens on the device and I'm not feeding any unwanted signals to anyone.

Constantly on the lookout for pure Linux based devices. Unfortunately, yet to my hands on Librem based device or on a Fairphone!

I hope the world moves towards a Linux based device (being a Linux user for close to 3+ decades (since the early Sco Unix times with core systems programming, I always dream of it! BTW, being a hardcore C programmer who has worked across almost all OSes and CPU architectures!) and such wish and dream will fully be fulfilled only on Linux or on *nix with firm belief!

Hope someone takes a serious move...

You misunderstood my comment.. this level of "support" is based on hacks = volunteer work, where the community working together (for free) is able to support one device "almost" completely after only 8 years, relying on hacks/reverse engineering etc..

But it's not like OnePlus or Qualcomm officially supports that, right? They didn't have any deal with any OEM where there would be someone employed to support the OS.. (even though they receive donations)

Like, all this is.. not serious.. the closest alternative to Android/iOS is GrapheneOS, because there are full-time employees AND they have a partnership with Motorola, so they won't have to rely on any hacks.. well obviously that's unaffordable but it's a different story.

> You misunderstood my comment.. this level of "support" is based on hacks = volunteer work, where the community working together (for free) is able to support one device "almost" completely after only 8 years, relying on hacks/reverse engineering etc..

I guess you have not seen any of actual Qualcomm code yet to say that, Qualcomm code is really what you would define as a pile hacks. Made by hardware engineers with no regards for code quality, maintainability or mainlinability.

OnePlus 6 comparatively is almost mainlined properly from start to finish, with a level of quality that you have nowhere in the mobile world.

Sure this smartphone a bit older but remember the Nokia N900 is still supported and it went out in 2009.

Mainlining mobile devices is very hard, but that's not hacks, that's how it's supposed to be done.

Yes, I get your point.

I'd say the waterline of mobile Linux "seriousness" is whether a device has a bootable mainline kernel build. Once SoC support lands in the kernel, it becomes a problem for a lot of people on high salaries (including some at Qualcomm). And hardware support doesn't get dropped from the kernel overnight. For everything above, in userspace, you don't need a deal with OEMs or their blessing to make things work. It's a pretty generic stack: Alpine, systemd, familiar WMs/DEs.

But yeah, I hope to see more deals like the recent Motorola-GrapheneOS announcement in the future.

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